Fyra ihjälskjutna i brittisk bil vid fransk sjö (2012-09-05)

The revelation about Mr Thompson provides a window into Mrs Al-Hilli’s past and raises the possibility that she could have been the target, not her husband.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2684400/Al-Hilli-Alps-muirder-Police-investigating-deaths-British-family-shot-French-Alps-reveal-wife-secret -ex-husband-died-America-day.html

Först berättade de att den yngre av de mördade kvinnorna hade en ex-man i USA, som hon hållit hemlig för sin omgivning. Den amerikanske mannen dog samma dag som Alpmorden ägde rum. Den officiella dödsorsaken var hjärtattack.
Som om inte detta vore märkligt nog avslöjades det sedan att polisen misstänker att mannens död inte är någon osannolik slump.

For a start, there is no doubt that Iqbal wished to keep her brief first marriage a secret. She certainly lied about it when she married Saad in Surrey on August 28, 2003, two years after abandoning her first husband.
Signing herself by her maiden name — Iqbal Al-Saffar — she failed to declare her first marriage to officials at the register office in Weybridge.
Under UK law, those who have been married previously must produce documentary evidence of their divorce. Instead, Iqbal declared that she was a ‘spinster’ — the legal term for an unmarried woman — raising the possibility that she did not even tell her new husband about her previous marriage.
Conversations with the Thompson family in the U.S. this week have left little doubt that the civil ceremony between Jim Thompson and ‘Kelly’ in 1999 was purely a marriage of convenience, arranged to help her obtain a U.S. Green Card so she could work in the States.
Jim Thompson’s son, 28-year-old Joshua, told the Mail: ‘The relationship between my father and Kelly was not sexual. It was never discussed but, being a teenager, you pick up on these sort of things.
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Thompson’s other relatives go even further, recalling that the couple occupied separate bedrooms at their neat detached home.
‘Kelly was a virgin when she arrived, and a virgin when she left,’ said one.
Friends of the family were also aware this was a marriage of convenience.
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So how on earth did this unlikely pair meet? It was a convoluted process which began in Dubai, where Iqbal lived and worked for several years before her move to the U.S.
Born in Iraq in 1965 into the wealthy Al-Saffar family, she spent much of her childhood and 20s in Sweden before moving to Dubai to work as a dentist.
Yet Iqbal’s dream was to live and work in America, and a doctor friend offered to put her in touch with an Iraqi businessman, Sabah Al-Shaikhly, in Atlanta.
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Al-Shaikhly invited Iqbal to stay at the home he shared with his wife Mary, who also happened to be Jim Thompson’s niece.
It was at a family gathering in New Orleans that Iqbal — who now went by the Westernised name of ‘Kelly’ — first met Jim and came up with the idea of a marriage of convenience which would enable to her to get a coveted Green Card, allowing her to work legally in the U.S.
‘Kelly came to New Orleans for a visit,’ says Jim’s sister Judy Weatherly, ‘and when she ran out of money she moved in with my daughter Mary and her husband Sabah.’
According to Jim Thompson’s son, 28-year-old Joshua, ‘Kelly’ bought his father a Honda Accord car in return for agreeing to the marriage.
His daughter Joy, 38, says her father was also promised a Harley Davidson which never materialised, but adds: ‘He did like her a lot. He wouldn’t have married her if he didn’t like her. He wanted to help her out.’
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But while Jim Thompson and his family never heard from her again and assumed that her brief presence in their lives was just because of her need for a Green Card, FBI agents, at the request of Interpol, have been probing whether there were other reasons for her stay in the U.S.
They have examined Thompson’s past as an oil rig worker and as manager at a company which manufactured pipelines for the United Arab Emirates, although by the time he married Iqbal he was working as a handyman.
One man who might be expected to know the truth about Iqbal’s first marriage is the man who helped arrange it — Sabah Al Shaikhly. This week, the Mail tracked him down to New Mexico, where he is now divorced from Jim’s niece and is working as a satellite and communications specialist.
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The Mail has discovered that this latest twist in the Alps tragedy was randomly dropped into a conversation between a police officer and a French journalist from a local paper in recent weeks.
Officers have now told the Mail that they knew about the first marriage as early as December 2012
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‘Given the facts which are now circulating, investigators are looking to make a new demand to the FBI that will perhaps lead to an exhumation and autopsy; but what we will discover two years after the death we will have to see.’
Senior police officer Lt Col Benoit Vinnemann also insists that Thompson’s death may have been more than a freak coincidence: ‘We still haven’t had a response to certain questions. We have discovered some astonishing things.’
What those ‘astonishing things’ are, however, remains to be seen. It is impossible not to wonder whether by revealing this latest twist only now, French police are merely trying to give the impressions that their flagging investigation is yielding new discoveries.